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by m132 74 days ago
This. Also, for phones that don't support Android virtualization, there's a user-space hack, part of Termux upstream, that allows for root-less chroots via LD_PRELOAD: https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/PRoot.

systemd won't boot with this (needs to be PID 1), but a lot of software will work just fine and there's nearly zero emulation overhead.

1 comments

I don't think it uses LD_PRELOAD, it uses ptrace to intercept system calls (hence the name). Unfortunately this does have performance overhead, although I've never bothered to measure it. Actually that would be an interesting thing to benchmark.
My bad, I must have confused it with something else. Yes, it uses ptrace; there definitely is some overhead around system calls, but that still should be better than running atop a full-scale CPU emulator. That being said, I haven't benchmarked it myself, just remember it being pretty snappy.

Thanks for your correction!